And the companies are also struggling to recover, right? Because the damage to the company is commensurate with the damage to the environment it works within?

No? The companies are largely free from consequence?

Maybe our system is a bit broken.

As another comment pointed out - total cost to BP over this is somewhere in excess of $140BN. It's hardly "free of consequence".

When a human does something really really really bad, they go to jail and then they struggle for the rest of their life (not saying it's good).

When a company fucks up like that, it should die, and the people deemed responsible should go to jail. And if we cannot find who is responsible, then the top-level executives should go to jail. They are paid so much because they are "responsible", aren't they?

"But think about the normal employees losing their job when such a company fucks up", I hear. Well, think about the employees who lose their job when a normal company bankrupts "normally", who cares? And maybe, just maybe, there would then be whistleblowers from the inside because they would actually risk their job by just not contributing to preventing the company from fucking up that bad.

Yeah sure... https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BP:LON?window=MAX&tab=e...

I don't understand what you're implying.

Their stock price is near ATHs and their revenue looks pretty good. Maybe they lost a bit at the time but they don't seem to be feeling any long term consequences from that. The implication is that relative to the damage they caused they don't seem to have suffered any actual consequences. Up to the reader to decide for themselves, but I'm pushing back on the idea this was some cataclysmic event to body-corporate.

Their stock price hasn't recovered to where it was when the disaster happened more than 15 years after the event, and they are out $140 billion.

Its kind of deceptive to talk about nearing an all time high without mentioning that the current all time high was 2 decades ago.

I mean we can't know where they'd be in the counterfactual scenario. Glancing at Shell and Exxon shows BP is probably underperforming similar companies. How much of that is due to this event vs. other factors? I don't know. We wouldn't tend to expect the same extent of up-and-to-the-right behavior from dividend producing shares but BP seem to be failing to capitalize on the current oil price spike.

My point is merely that reasonable people can disagree if there was a suitable consequence to the event. Sure they're out 140 billion, but to a company like this that's not as grand as it sounds and not at all fatal. You provided your view, I am providing mine, which is that they did not suffer sufficiently.

I didn't actually provide my view on that.

I just said that the evidence that you are picking from tells a more complex story than "their stock is near an ATH" when it hasn't even recovered to where it was the day before the disaster.

[deleted]
[deleted]